October 31, 2012

If the liner notes of this 1960 Ames Brothers LP are accurate, their version of Night Train represents the first vocal version of the song ever recorded. To be honest, until I found this record at the local Goodwill store a couple of weeks ago, I didn't know anyone had ever done a vocal version of the tune. Well, there's James Brown's spectacular 1962 King records version which has vocals but those consist mostly of the name of the song interspersed with city names and that's a different approach than the traditional verse-chorus technique employed here by the Ames Brothers.

The song was originally recorded by Jimmy Forrest in 1952 and loosely based on a riff cooked up by Duke Ellington's sax player Johnny Hodges, who used it on his 1940 release That's The Blues Old Man.

As for the Ames Brothers, you might scratch your head and wonder what the hell they (or their producers) were thinking as their smooth bland vocals don't mesh very well with the brooding and atmospheric instrumental track in the background. The whole thing is such a headscratcher, I thought I'd put it up for your listening enjoyment. Or misery.

October 17, 2012

The web site Rural Route Films decribes this low-budget backwoods hillbilly flick this way: "Originally released under the unfortunate title Miss Jessica Is Pregnant (it was filmed under the title Spring Night, Summer Night), this 1968 portrait of poverty-stricken Appalachia represents a unique moment in the history of the American independent film. Shot entirely on location in Southern Ohio, the story of a young couple, who may or may not share a father, marks the start of a movement in regional cinema that became increasingly popular through the 1970s and 1980s as filmmakers took up the task of exploring an America outside of Hollywood. Today the film allows viewers a unique glimpse back in time, to witness the concerns and constraints of the "New American Cinema" when it was first taking shape. That the film bravely confronts incest - the most taboo of all rural stereotypes - without prejudice makes it all the more singular." The trailer, which features brief nudity, can be seen over on YouTube.

All of which kind of brings to mind a couple of jarringly weird "brother/sister love" country 45s that were blogged here long ago.

September 19, 2012

The My Lai Massacre was surely the ugliest incident of the entire Vietnam war. The event took place in March 1968 and involved members of the U.S. Army murdering hundreds of unarmed civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Estimates place the number of victims at somewhere between approximately 350 and 500 people, many of them women, children and the elderly.

The awful killings inspired a number of topical country songs about the event, almost all of which, in a position that doesn't seem too defensible in hindsight, defended William Calley, the Leiutenant who ordered the killings.

Ivan Lee's The Cry Of My Lai, however, is an exception in that it offers Calley no support and, in fact, decisively condemns his actions. In case you missed it, this event was the subject of an earlier Beware Of The Blog post, one that included 9 other records about the massacre.

September 05, 2012

What was 1951's loopiest and most contagious hillbilly novelty song? Judging by the number of cover versions it spawned, it had to be Chew Tobacco Rag, written and originally recorded by Texan Billy Briggs for the Imperial label. Briggs' version never managed to chart, but Zeb Turner's version, released on King, made it all the way to within spitting distance of topping the charts, finally losing momentum at #8.

August 22, 2012

Upon returning from a trip to Mexico on August 22, 1968, Tammy Wynette formally announced her marriage to George Jones. If Tammy hadn't been lying, today would be the 44th anniversary of their marriage. In reality, however, the couple got hitched six months later, on February 16, 1969 in Ringgold, Georgia, a frequent destination for Nashville elopers in those days.

Following their marriage, the couple relocated to Lakeland, Florida, where, adjacent to their home on Central Barn Road, they opened a short-lived outdoor country music venue called the Old Plantation Music Park.

Speaking of country music shows, George Jones recently announced that next year he's officially retiring from the road following a farewell tour that will take him to approximately 60 cities. If he comes to your town, you should probably go.

Notes: 1. Unlike most of the MP3s I post here, these two songs are still very findable in the marketplace, so they're offered here in truncated versions. 2. The photo above was borrowed from the 2010 book Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough.

August 08, 2012

On July 18, 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne left a Martha's Vineyard party with Senator Ted Kennedy, who piloted his Oldsmobile 88 off the side of a nearby bridge and into the water below. He managed to escape, but Kopechne drowned in the car. In an act of indefensible cowardice, Kennedy fled the scene and did not get around contacting the police until 10AM the next morning.

It's somewhat amazing, but people were still recording songs about the event 11 years later. Well, maybe not people in general, but Marvin Solley. Solley ratchets up the intensity factor by beginning his song with sound effects of a car skidding out of control and plunging into the water.

July 25, 2012

Yep, it's time for another dispatch about the Silver Bridge disaster. I really never intended to do four of these, but somehow I keep finding additional 45s about this terrible event, and I'm contractually obligated to share 'em all with you, so here we go again. Incidentally, parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found at the linked numbers in this sentence.

In case you're new to this tragic story, the Silver Bridge spanned the Ohio River between Kanuaga, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virginia from 1928 until December 15, 1967 when it collapsed and fell into the icy waters below. The catastrophe, which happened during the busy afternoon rush hour, cost 46 people their lives.

The tragedy was the inspiration for a number of topical records; I'm up to nine at this point and I have a feeling that the well's pretty close to dry at this point. The disc we're focused on today comes from the REM label, a Lexington, Kentucky outfit that took its name from the initials of owner Robert E. Mooney, who also produced this piece.

June 27, 2012

Decades ago, before the era of huge radio conglamerates and when many DJs actually had the freedom to pick personally the tunes heard on their shows, a fair number of singers decided to record songs about DJs themselves, no doubt in the hopes of increasing their record's appeal to the various gatekeepers behind the microphones.

June 13, 2012

Country music, along with its close cousin bluegrass, has a long and well-documented history as being a vehicle for musical tributes to people and events in news. Topical songs like this one, recorded just after high wire walker Karl Wallenda fell to his death in Puerto Rico in 1978, often document events from personal perspectives that don't always make it into the history books. I feel like I'm not going too far out on a limb if I proclaim this to be the world's only bluegrass Karl Wallenda tribute 45.

The name Wallenda has been cropping up in a lot of recent news stories due to the fact that Karl's grandson, Nik Wallenda, will attempt on Friday to be the first person to cross the brink of Niagara Falls on a high wire. Others have crossed the river gorge on a wire, but not at the brink - always downriver. ABC will broadcast the stunt on live television but insists, over Wallenda's objections, that he wear a body harness to prevent his death should he fall.

According to the Associated Press, ABC has determined that legal liability considerations prohibit the network from footing any of the astonomical bills associated with Wallenda's preparations, permits, and materials, such as the 7-ton two-inch thick cable purchased to span the gorge. Wallenda's set up a donation page over at Indiegogo to help defray the stunt's spiralling costs, so kick in a few bucks and help the guy out.

Today I'd like to shine the light on a formerly obscure tearjerker (OK, never mind, it's going to remain obscure) from Lee "Hoss" Moss that pulls no punches. Moss, an Orlando area country DJ, released this preposterously tragic anti-drunk driving record in the mid 1960s.

If you've ever heard Ferlin Husky's 1954 recording of The Drunken Driver, you know where this wreck winds up. That's right, just like in the Ferlin Husky record, a guy gets boozed up and hops behind the wheel, only to plow over and kill his own kid. The storyline on the Moss record is almost exactly identical to that heard Husky's The Drunken Driver, though the intensity was toned down a bit as Husky killed two of his kids in the mayhem and Moss just one.

And if you really can't resist depression, you can check out two other versions of The Drunken Driver. Here's one by Ricky Skaggs and you can visit the Beware Of The Blog archives to hear Harley Ford's take on this tragic tune.

May 02, 2012

In addition to making quite a few records under his own name, Floyd Cramer played piano on thousands of Nashville recording sessions. He can regularly be heard on records by Elvis Presley (Heartbreak Hotel, for instance), the Everly Brothers, Don Gibson, Eddy Arnold, Brenda Lee, Chet Atkins, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline to name just a few.

Most of the records he released under his own name are pleasant enough, I suppose, but I find them a bit too refined and full of pop flourishes to track them down and purchase them. Exceptions can be made however and here's one of them. In 1967, he released a 45 rpm recording of Stood Up (#53 on the country charts) and decided to put the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations on the b-side, a seemingly suprprising choice. Or maybe it wasn't so surprising, as he also recorded the LP Floyd Cramer Plays The Monkees in the same year.

April 18, 2012

If you have any appreciation at all for country music, you owe it to yourself to do whatever you can to get to Nashville to check out the Country Music Hall Of Fame's extraordinary new exhibit. Fortunately, you have a pretty spacious window in which to do so. The exhibit, which just opened and runs through December 2013, does a fantastic job of documenting the fabled "Bakersfield Sound," generally characterized by the sharp and piercing sounds of Fender Telecaster guitars, accompanied by fiddles, steel guitars and a honky-tonk ethos that was becoming less prominent in Nashville at the time.

The Hall is literally jam-packed with an amazing collection of guitars, fiddles, amps, stage costumes, photos, hand-written lyrics and miscellaneous ephemera documenting the country sounds emanating from not only Bakersfield, but Los Angeles and the West Coast in general.

April 04, 2012

The amazing and multifaceted Merle Haggard will celebrate his 75th birthday on Friday, so I thought the time was right to pay tribute to him by sharing a quartet of tribute discs. Merle's been a little under the weather recently, as you likely know. In January, he spent several days in the hospital in Macon, Georgia getting treated for pneumonia and diverticulitis. Here's hoping for a total recovery.

March 21, 2012

On April 10, 1963 the USS Thresher, an American nuclear-powered attack submarine sank while doing dive tests in the Atlantic Ocean 200 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. Following a power failure, the submarine imploded at crush depth resulting in the deaths of all 129 men on board.

Jim Richardson, Jr. was not the only one to head into the recording studio to memorialize the tragedy. Phil Ochs recorded an entirely different song called The Thresher for his 1964 Elektra LP All The News That's Fit To Sing. And Abner Jay, an idiosyncratic folk / blues singer from Fitzgerald, Georgia who described himself as "the last southern black minstrel" also recorded yet another song with the same title.

March 07, 2012

I should probably warn you, this is a sad and disturbing story. Little Rose Marie, a record by Bill Woods, one of the founders of the legendary Bakersfield music scene, memorializes six-year-old Rose Marie Riddle, brutally raped and murdered at the hands of Richard Arlen Lindsey and his wife, Dixie.

According to court documents, while driving through Kern County on the afternoon of January 12, 1961, Lindsey told his wife, 7 months pregnant at the time, that he wanted a little girl for sexual purposes. They drove into the Shafter labor camp, about 20 miles northwest of Bakersfield, and Dixie spoke to some children playing outside, saying that she wanted to hire someone to clean up her house. No doubt money's tight in a labor camp so one of the kids went into a nearby house and returned with young Rose Marie, who unfortunately got into the car with the Lindseys.

February 22, 2012

If you believe the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History & Culture, pioneering western swing band leader Spade Cooley was born on this day in 1910. Plenty of other web sources list Cooley's birthdate as December 17, 1910, though, and I'm not sure who to believe. Regardless of exactly when his birthday is, it's a fine day to share with you this tribute 45.

Cooley enjoyed a long and prosperous career in radio, films, television, records and live performances, but remains quite notorious for the fact that he was convicted of murder in the first degree for the extremely brutal slaying of his wife Ella Mae in 1961, following which he received a life sentence.

Ode To Spade is Tommy Graham's Spade Cooley tribute disc, released shortly after Cooley's fatal heart attack on November 23, 1969 following a performance. The show, performed during a 72-hour jail furlough, was held at the Oakland Auditorium, now known as the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, which was recently in national news when members of Occupy Oakland attempted to take over the long vacant building and use it for their headquarters. Graham and Cooley were both inmates at the Vacaville Medical Center, and became friends while incarcerated.

For the most detailed and extensive report on the rise and fall of Spade Cooley, I highly recommend John Marr's Murder Can Be Fun #19, available for a mere $2 plus a modest $1 shipping charge. The Michael McMahon illustration above appears there, and it can also be found in an issue of Lowest Common Denominator, the former house organ of WFMU.

In July 1948, Caryl Chessman, also known as "The Red Light Bandit," was sentenced to die in the California gas chamber after being convicted on 17 charges of robbery, kidnapping and rape. Chessman's residence on death row was somewhat anomalous in that his crimes did not involve the taking of a life. However, the fact that he was convicted of kidnapping with bodily harm enabled the state of California to charge him with the violation of the Federal Kidnapping Act (sometimes referred to as the Little Lindbergh Law), which was regarded as a capital offense.

January 25, 2012

The Tale Of Floyd Collins comes to us from Arkansas native Ronnie Hawkins, who found success and fame after following Conway Twitty's advice and relocating to Canada.

In 1960, several decades after the fact, Hawkins, a cousin of rockabilly pioneer Dale Hawkins, released this topical song about the 1925 death of cave explorer Floyd Collins who became trapped 55 feet underground in what is now part of Mammoth Cave National Park just outside of Cave City, Kentucky. Collins got stuck while exploring and though rescue teams worked around the clock to try to save him, they were ulimately unsuccessful and after 14 hellish days Collins succumbed to exposure, thirst and starvation.

January 11, 2012

Don't let that seemingly happy and carefree countenance in the photo fool you, friends. Ray Price isn't a happy man, at least not if you judge him by the long string of essential honky-tonk records he made in the 1950s and 60s.

Sure, a ton of great country music comes from a place of emotional despondency, but I don't think anyone ever devoted more time, energy and talent to gloriously mournful tales of grief-stricken losers in the game of love. So regularly and convincingly has he visited this territory, in fact, that I feel confident in assuming that Ray would understand if I described him as looking at the world through morose-colored glasses. But it's not just the fact that he comes across as a guy who's not happy unless he's miserable that makes his best records so great, it's also the fact that they were unbelievably well-written songs, expertly played and produced, and simply catchy as all get out.

There were several key ingredients to what became known as the "Ray Price sound," usually just referred to as a shuffle these days. A walking 4/4 bass line, played in tandem by both an upright and an electric bass, is a necessity and so is a fiddle / steel guitar combo, which allows either instrument to serve as a sympathetic counterpoint to Price's voice throughout the song. Another big part of the sound is the high tenor harmony vocals that can be heard on each chorus and, of course, Ray's incredible voice which evokes haunted loneliness and pain better than any other voice I've ever heard. Throw in some drums and you've got the most important elements of the irresistible country shuffle sound.

If you're not familiar with sound of a Ray Price shuffle here's a sterling example, Heart Over Mind, recorded in 1961.

December 28, 2011

Ever notice how many crusty country honky-tonkers like Ernest Tubb seem to drink way more wine than you'd ever expect? Porter Wagoner comes to mind (One Dime For Wine, Daddy And The Wine, When I Drink My Wine) and so do Merle Haggard (Little Ole Wine Drinker Me, Wine Take Me Away), Faron Young (Wine Me Up), Johnny Bush (Back From The Wine, Waltz Of The Wine), and Bob Wills (Warm Red Wine) among others.

These are, generally speaking, the kind of guys you'd expect to be throwing back beer and shots if you ever encountered them nursing a heartache in a bar somewhere. Yet they seemed to have an unshakeable affinity for wine over and above all other alcoholic beverages. Sure, there are lyrical and metaphorical reasons for this, but I find it fun to contemplate all the same.

One of these days, I'll round up 10 or 20 of my favorite examples of this now-deceased trend but for today here's the Texas Troubadour himself, Ernest Tubb, with A Good Year For The Wine. I don't know about the rest of you, but at my house it was indeed a good year for the wine. And by wine, I mean beer.

And speaking of Ernest Tubb, here are some selected excerpts from The Troubadour, ET's fan club newsletter from the winter of 1964.